At first, it might seem odd, or just cheeky, that Rae Armantrout has named her new poetry collection Go Figure (hardcover, paperback, Kindle).
But when you get to the point in the following email interview where she explains how she wrote these poems after she started hanging out with some 7-year-old girls…
To start, is there an underlying theme that connects the poems in Go Figure?
I like to let a book grow organically. I trust it to find its themes. There is generally more than one ongoing interest or concern in my books. I don’t think top-down control — for instance, deciding in advance what you’re going to write about — works very well, at least in poetry. It’s better to discover where a book wants to go.
If I stand back far enough, I can say that all my books are about the process of trying to render some moment or moments of consciousness in language. That might sound like a cop-out, but it isn’t — not for me — because I’m truly interested in all the terms of that proposition. What is a moment? What is consciousness? Can language capture anything like “truth?” These issues are both philosophical and scientific. They’re also central to what it means to be human.
That said, each book is written in a different time period in my life and in history and whatever’s happening around me naturally enters into the poems. For that reason, a book written in 2024 would be different from one written in 1994. I wrote Go Figure over the course of a couple of years between approximately early 2021 and late 2022. The themes — tropes might be a better word; or maybe just ongoing concerns — are young children and fire. Fire is the way climate change tends to manifest itself in the West. I lived most of my life in San Diego, but for the last 7 years I have lived near Seattle to be near my 7-year-old twin granddaughters. Over the course of these last few years, I’ve done a lot of child care.
Needless to say, the problem of what kind of world we’re going to have gets even more pressing when you have young kids or grandkids. I can just flip through the book and list title after title that relates to these two related themes in one way or another. “It” imagines what it would be like to be a baby in a crib. “Freeze Tag” deals with the effects of the climate crisis. The title of “Child’s Play” speaks for itself. The conclusion of “Simply” involves both fire and children. “Preconditions” is about reading fairy tales to girls specifically. “Reconnaissance” involves both kids and fire. “Fire” is about, well, fire. (And I’ve only picked out a few examples.) You’re in Los Angeles, so you’re very aware of what the fire situation has been in California. You might think it was different in the Pacific Northwest. Yes and no. Western Washington has thus far been “too wet to burn,” but every summer there are fires in nearby drier forests — on the east side of the Cascades, in eastern British Columbia, and in Oregon. We get the smoke from all these fires. There was one day last summer when Seattle had the worst air on the planet. This year was relatively dry.
The poems in Go Figure seem to be free verse, or at least not rigidly structured. What is it about this form, of lack of it, that just works best for what you’re trying to express?
“Free Verse” has such an old-fashioned sound. Even the word “verse” sounds pretty stodgy. Poetry has been written in all kinds of ways across recorded history. “Free Verse” was what the early Modernists called poetry that broke away from regular meter and rhyme schemes. The kinds of meter and rhyme scheme you probably have in mind prevailed in English for maybe four centuries or so.. That is a long time — but it’s not forever. Since the early 2oth century, poetry has generally been written without such rules.
But that doesn’t mean sound isn’t important anymore. Not at all. There can still be rhyme, in fact, but it won’t always fall at the end of every other line, for instance, because why should it? Instead of meter, I like the words rhythm or cadence. I read my poems aloud to myself as I’m writing so I can really hear how they sound.
There are all kinds of ways for poems to be organized. If you look at the third poem in Go Figure, “Freeze Tag,” you’ll see right away that it’s composed of five stanzas each of which begins with the word “in.” The second word is always the name of a season. That’s called anaphora. Each stanza is made up of one phrase, one incomplete sentence. In this case the form does fit the meaning. The poem is “about” (I’m nervous about the way that word constrains possible meanings.) how we’re cutting short our life as a species by what we’re doing to the earth. The incompletion of the phrases might be said to emphasize that. I don’t always try to make the form reinforce the content so directly, but I do always care about sound.
“Freeze Tag” begins:
In spring when the firethorn
pimples with hard buds.
In summer when the rose
drops its rosy discards…
When I read this aloud, I stress the word “spring,” the first syllable of “firethorn,” the first syllable of “pimples” and the word “buds.” Try it. Reading it almost sounds like preaching or making a “stump speech.” Also it ends where it began-with spring. So that’s a kind of rhyme — and yet, technically, this is “free verse.”
You’ve written more than a dozen collections of poems. Are there any poems in Go Figure that were inspired or influenced by any poets or specific poems who are ones you wouldn’t consider a fundamental influence on your style the way you’ve previously credited William Carlos William?
I don’t know if any poems in the book were influenced by particular poets. Some were influenced by genres — such as nursery rhymes or fairy tales, movie reviews, etc. I was thinking of a movie review in “Skid” when I wrote, “A sentimental journey / through a doomsday scenario.” Doesn’t that describe every disaster movie?
Beyond that, I read a lot of nonfiction. I especially like reading about physics, cognitive science, and biology. In Go Figure, let’s see, “Simply” starts with a quote from biologist Nick Lane. “Organoids” was inspired by an article about growing clumps of human brain tissue in vats. “Debt Economy” and “Picture This” work with ideas from particle physics. There are probably others.
Some of the poems in Go Figure appeared in such anthologies as The Best American Poetry 2023 and Plume Poetry 10, as well as in such journals as The Yale Review, The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review. Are the versions of those poems in Go Figure the same as they were in those anthologies and journals?
Most of my poems go through a lot of versions. But they do that before I send them out. Once in a while, I change something slightly while it’s still being considered. I haven’t changed any of the poems you are referring to since they were published. At some point, you just have to move on.
Finally, if someone enjoys Go Figure, and it’s the first book of your poems they’ve read, which of your other collections would you suggest they pick up next?
Wesleyan published a couple of chapbooks of mine people might want to check out. Entanglements gathers some of my poems about subatomic physics. Notice collects some about the environmental crisis. If they want to go full on, let’s see: Finalists, Wobble, Versed, Next Life, The Pretext. It’s hard to choose among your children.
